I ordered a bunch of filament over a week ago. Status says it’s in stock but still sitting in California, meaning it will be a least late next week until I see it in my shop. I like the performance and convenience of Bambu’s filament/RF tags in my AMS/printers, but I’m having a really hard time justifying ordering it from them, especially when I could have filament from Amazon here tomorrow.
Good thing this is just a restocking order and not something I need for a rush job… Come on Bambu, do better.
I had an order sitting in Cali as well. I got an update about an emergency or weather and no tracking after that. It arrived yesterday. This is the first I’ve had an order take a week to get to me. I blame UPS not BL.
If you like the RFID tags but want/need to use other filaments, if the Bambu settings work with the other filaments you can tape the appropriate RFID tags to the other spools, or there are holders that fit the RFID tags and specific manufacturers spools available in MakerWorld.
Every spool that I empty with an RFID tag gets the tags harvested and marked with the kind of filament they encode just for this reason.
I agree! BL needs to get their supply chain in order. I have ordered hundreds from them and it is hit and miss. Back when they primarily used FedEx, it was a nightmare but they switched to UPS a month or so ago and it improved dramatically! I had actually ordered 8 spools on Monday and got them on Thursday. With that said, now all of a sudden, it has gone to ■■■■ again! with no clear indicator of why but I have actually received USPS tracking numbers which is disheartening if that is the path they are moving to. I really do prefer the BL filament overall after over 2000 hours of time on my printer and with the sale prices, it is competitive. It just requires some pre planning and making sure you have enough on hand.
I know someone else suggested re-using the RFID tags. I caution you with that mostly because I tried and it did not turn out very good. I was buying some E-sun, elegoo, and others and re-spooling it onto BL spools with a RFID tag. Thought I was a genius until I started having failed prints almost 50% of the time since the printer was using print setting for BL filament and the re-spooled stuff should have had a bit different settings. Maybe someone else has figured out what brand prints very similar to Bambu filament.
Yep - the only way nicking RFID tags to use with other filaments works is if the other filament prints ok using the Bambu settings, or you don’t mind editing some setting.
I haven’t used much but Hatchbox PLA seems to work ok.
And the delivery people/company thing is a problem. For a while the FedEx guys here would just claim shipments were refused and return stuff so they wouldn’t have to make their full route. It was hell because guess where we were. But they got better and UPS tanked. It’s all local issue stuff.
Online companies need to let us choose our shipper so we can pick ones that aren’t having issues in our own locations.
Same Problem - It shipped quickly it was the transit time that took a week. I learned to pre order but I am having endless problems with the filament shipping from CA rather than the ones that shipped from Dallas
I hear ya about Fedex! They delivered 4 times to the wrong address!! And to make it even more crazy, it wasn’t the same address 4 times, it was 4 different houses that were not my address!!! The only way i fixed it was I saw a Fedex truck pull up in my neighbors, 3 houses down and I hopped in my truck and blocked him in because he just delivered it to the wrong house! He finally looked at the box, looked at the address on the house, looked back at the box and said, and I quote “Damn, thats not the right address on the house”. He explained that the driver system tells them which driveway to pull into and he had to leave it where the system told him to drop it off at…I didn’t buy it so I raised holly havec with BL and Fedex for 2 weeks until I got a polite message from Fedex that the my local driver had been changed. All of a sudden, my packages would be delivered albeit sometimes as many as 10 days after it told me it was on a truck for a delivery. (pretty sure that was my punishment for ratting out the driver)
Yeah… the FedEx thing is not good. When I order something and I see that it’s being sent via FedEx my heart sinks. I’ve had more problems with FedEx than UPS, USPS, and DHL combined: delivered to the wrong house, claims of “shipment refused” when the driver wasn’t even here, parcels lost in transit… the list goes on. I wish suppliers would allow you to select the shipping method at checkout.
That being said, this is UPS’ cock-up. They claim they received the package from Bambu on the 3rd, arrived at LA on the 3rd, departed LA on the 3rd, arrived back at LA on the 4th and if the status is to be believed, has been sitting there ever since (for 5 days). UPS is usually pretty good, but they dropped the ball on this one. Maybe it’s a California thing.